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Technology Business Management

In the State of Washington, cost modeling is done in accordance with the adopted taxonomy and starts with modeling costs to the technology towers. TBM Program technology towers are key to the foundation and support moving to the next level of maturity which entails modeling costs to the applications, business services and business capabilities.

The WA State Department of Revenue has developed a very cool new visualization of the savings to taxpayers from various tax incentives and policies. It's a Tableau interactive visualization posted online, (see below) and the data behind it is also available for bulk download as an Excel file.

The State of WA publishes a variety of large datasets on government contracts that are often of interest to transparency advocates and the civic tech community. Here are a couple of examples that deserve more attention:

Agency Contracts with vendors active in 2014

Navigating TBM Program Changes

Washington state TBM Program journey started in 2012. The program encountered and overcame several challenges during the early years. Leveraging lessons learned, in 2016 the community supported a program "reboot" that was more centered on a strategic approach resulting in increased value. Following are published articles on navigating TBM Program changes and capturing value in Washington state.

Four teams of interns pitched their work product to state agency and tech sector mentors this week on the sidelines of Full Con Tech - the innovative problem-solving unconference in Seattle.

These students have worked through the summer with mentorship from companies like Microsoft, Socrata, Tableau and LiveStories to understand, clean up and visualize data from state agencies like Employment Security, Labor and Industries, Revenue and Early Learning. And the visualizations were EXCELLENT.

To facilitate communication and gain alignment between IT, Finance and Business areas we recognized a common language or taxonomy was needed. The program initially used a "custom" taxonomy to identify pools of cost and technologies which resulted in everyone speaking a common language however led to missed opportunities in executive level reporting. To close the gap on the reporting, beginning fiscal year 2017 the program moved to industry standard TBM Taxonomy that’s governed and maintained by the TBM Council Board Committee on Standards.

Our goals for Fiscal Year 2020-2021 focuses on agencies who have engaged TBM to mature their IT portfolio management initiatives using data driven analysis from the program. This includes providing 5 "kick start" maturity sprints for agencies advancing past the Cost Pool and IT Resource Tower stage. The kick start sprints provide greater financial insight into application total cost of ownership, budget IT spend versus actuals, IT projects, cloud technology and business capabilities.

TBM is a set of best practices for running IT like a business to effectively and consistently communicate the cost of IT along with the business services IT provides. The primary goal of TBM is to provide the ability of IT and business leaders to have data-driven discussions about cost and value of IT to best support business goals.